Questions about moving Ubuntu to a new hard drive

[Craig Hagerman]

On 4/16/07, Luis Mondesi <lemsx1 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> man tar
>
> from old drive to new drive mounted on /mnt/new_drive
>
> cd /mnt/new_drive
> tar --exclude='*new_drive*' cf - / | tar xf -
>
> That's assuming that the new drive is formatted correctly and all your
> partitions are mounted properly.
>
> > (2) Are there any issues involved with using an SATA drive to boot from. I
> seem to remember there were some issues a couple years ago when I first
> built this computer... but I can't remember what it was any more? Maybe it
> was that windows doesn't (or didn't) like to boot from SATA? If the new root
> drive is SATA will I face any difficulties I wouldn't with ATA?
>
>
> After Edgy there are no issues with SATA disks. They are just seen as
> regular SCSI disks, same like ATA and everything else.  If your BIOS
> supports booting from SATA disks, then you should have no problems.
>
> I'll suggest that you use LVM on your new disk. You can do this by creating
> a 200MB /boot partition and a volume group for your Ubuntu installation (for
> a Desktop you don't really need a partition for /home).
>
> The beauty about LVM is that later when you decide to add another disk to
> your computer, you don't have to do anything. to transfer your files. Just
> add the disk and grow the partition (span between the two disks).
>
> There is a lot of literature about LVM online. Try Howtoforge and The Linux
> Documentation Project (TLDP). Google is your friend.
>
> Regards,
>
> --
> ----)(-----
> Luis Mondesi



Thanks for the example of how to use the tar command Luis.

I do know about LVM. I was on the LVM users mailing list and used it
for a couple of years, but I stopped using it. I had used LVM to make
two large discs appear as one huge disc (ie 250 GB + 300 GB = 550GB
LVM volume). After a while I started wondering what would happen if
one drive failed. I have had a hard drive fail suddenly more than once
(I am sure we all have) and know that all drives will fail eventually.
With my large LVM drive people kept pointing me to RAID. But a
mirrored RAID (1) defeats the purpose of using LMV to make one large
drive. RAID 0 would be striped but without parity, defeating the
purpose of RAID for recovery. RAID 5 does striping with parity but
needs at least 3 discs (I had two). I asked the LVM group a few times
how or if it was possible to recover data from a good drive is the bad
one went, and I basically was told 'that isn't what LVM is about'.
Myself and some other people throught that should be included in what
a volume manager is about. For that reason I have gotten rid of LVM
and gone back to having separate discs.

As far as I see it there are two uses for LVM: (1) to make two or more
discs appear as one large contiguous disc and (2) a better way to
'partition' a disc that can be easily and safely expanded/contracted.
I think that (2) is great, but for the reasons above I have a problem
with (1) if there is no fault recovery built in anywhere.

Thanks,

Craig